Macrovision in RGB?

[seangoesbonk]

Does anybody know whether or not there is any Macrovision signal present at the RGB out (monitor jack) on a standard PC?

[Electro]

There is Macrovision on the VGA signals, but only if the video file (VOB encoded with copyright info) was decoded by DVD software or hardware. Any VGA to TV converter that is used will be distorted when playing DVD movies. There are alternatives. If you have a huge hard drive (10 gigabytes or more and atleast FAT32 or better) then you can decrypt the macrovision from movies. There is software on the internet that can do this and a few are free.

[woneill]

Does anybody know what the details of Macrovision are?

I thought it was simply that they screwed with the gain of the sync and chrominance components of the composite video signal.

Nothing they can do to a VGA signal that displays properly on a regular monitor would be difficult to strip off. All components (R,G,B, V-Sync and H-Sync) are separated, and in order to accommodate the high frequencies and colour resolutions and non-standard video modes, there could not be a weird DRM system imposed.

The only reason macrovision survives at all is that when the video recorder manufacturers stabilised their gain circuits the same way the TV does, they were ordered by the FCC to stop doing so. Thus Macrovision is not hard to defeat - it is just that the video recorder manufacturers were not allowed to...

Bill.

[Electro]

DVD movies uses a sector by sector encryption that uses CSS.

Go to http://www.deforest.org/CSS/ for more information

Also look up DVD Decryptor.

[woneill]

Hi Guys,

CSS is not Macrovision. It is a way of encrypting sectors on the DVD disc, and requires any accessing software/hardware to know the decryption key.

All commercial DVD players have the appropriate keys, as do commercial software players.

The issues on the Internet about De-CSS involved a group of people reverse-engineering this scheme, and making the knowledge of the mechanisms, and keys, public.

Thus, a DVD can be "ripped" and its data stored on a hard disk as VOB files which can be played or copied without restriction.

The VOB file is an interleave of multiple other files (or data streams) containing MPEG-2 video data, audio data in multiple languages/formats, subtitle information etc.

Included in the mix is a special flag that tels DVD hardware to inject Macrovision signal distortion into the video output signal. (As I mentioned earlier, I thought this was limited to Composite Video, but I might be wrong).

The Macrovision is definitely injected through hardware, and was only an issue if a hardware decoder was used to produce the video signal. (ATI Radeon DVD decoder boards, and the Sigma Hollywood Plus, etc.)

Bill.